This page is a little bit about why I find games to be interesting as a topic of research, and not only a fun way to waste time.
It's fairly rare to see game development presented as a topic of research. Where it exists, the discussion is usually about either physical simulation or graphical rendering. To be fair, those are very challenging and interesting areas. "Game design" itself is somewhat discredited as an undergraduate degree, primarily due to saturation in an industry that mostly needs developers, artists and sound designers. It's not exactly cold fusion or cancer research, right?
But let's step back a second. Video gaming, which for most purposes started in the 80s, is now a multi-billion dollar industry with a mind-boggling amount of engineering effort behind it. We've gone from quarter-hungry 8-bit arcade machines to cinematic-quality animation on one's laptop or phone. Complexity of those games has risen, too: In Pacman, you move around a fixed maze and have no other controls whatsoever, but these days a standard title would have game mechanics and systems that are each, individually, far more complex than Pacman in its entirety. Correspondingly, the stories video games are capable of telling have also grown in complexity.
And yet, gaming has faced some resistance as a new medium -- for a while, gaming was viewed as pretty much for young kids, underachievers, or asocial nerds, and to this day it has somewhat of a lingering stigma in this respect. It's reminiscent of the strong negative response to the early growth of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons in the 80s and 90s, which are now far better accepted. I recall frequent arguments on internet forums as a child about whether video games could be considered art. I argued, and would still argue, that they are just interactive art facilitated by technology. That's precisely what games and other interactive experiences uniquely offer compared to, say, movies: another dimension of experience, one that includes the viewer. This dimension allows games with minimal or even nonexistent graphics to capture the imagination. Which brings me to an important point.
I mentioned Dungeons & Dragons. For those unfamiliar, you play D&D by pretending to be a character in the fantasy game world, and having a storyteller, the Dungeon Master, make decisions about how the world itself and the non-player characters within it react to your actions. Of course, there is also a lot of book-keeping and dice rolls to keep things fair -- the game rules keep track of your character. At the end of the day, you are just using your imagination while sitting around a table, but with imaginative players and a descriptive storyteller, it can produce very entertaining gameplay and even epic stories that will be remembered for years to come. But the rules of D&D, in place to help ensure the game world is somewhat grounded and consistent with reality, can be quite complex at times and often require some simple math. Remembering these rules is hard, and spending time adding up bonuses distracts from the experience. So, early computer games tried to take these rules and automate them, producing games like Final Fantasy and Wizardry which set the genre expectations for computer roleplaying games. While fun, those games had a usually rigidly fixed, linear storyline, with little opportunity to diverge. But in fact, this was one of D&D's biggest draws: collective, emergent storytelling that is both hand-crafted and able to adapt to your actions.
More recently, open-world "sandbox" type video games have become quite popular. These games present a large game world and drop the player in without necessarily giving them a strict path to follow or what specifically to do. Especially in concert with procedurally generated content, this model offers players a large amount of activities. There are problems, though. First, generating pieces of content that are compelling and feel significant and novel is hard. Even if your game world is filled with cool procedurally-generated mountain ranges, it won't be long before players get bored and all mountains start to blend together. Eventually, they'll have seen every meaningful combination of features. Second, linking the player's actions together across different parts of the game world coherently is difficult. Usually, players want to feel like they're in a book or movie about them. How many stories do you know of where the main character stops their quest to raise chickens for a few weeks? It may be fun for the player, but without coherence, the game is just a playground of disconnected fixtures, no greater than the sum of its parts.
I've played several games that, in contrast to stereotypes, were rich and immersive with a deep social element. My hope is that these games will become more popular while retaining what makes them unique as interactive experiences, and that gaming can shed any lingering stigma as an art-form.
In my view, the best game would be one that most immerses the player, regardless of the actual genre. To that end, there are any number of avenues for research and development. These include improvements to virtual reality (and related peripherals, like force-feedback), procedural and adaptive storytelling (to get the advantages of a creative storyteller alongside an open, interesting world), or new paradigms and architectures for games. It might include developing ways to facilitate ever-growing numbers of users, or it might mean creating better tools for players to contribute their own content to the games they play. Also, because games are so complex on multiple levels, there is a great deal of research to be done in optimal game engine design and in producing languages and libraries that enable complex concepts to be expressed simply.
I'm optimistic that with innovation in game development technology we will have a world where games as an artistic medium are more fully explored. Games have also proven to be a testing ground for reinforcement learning techniques, acting as a suitable environment for simulating intelligent agents, so this may even come back to benefit other fields of research.
In the end, technology will touch all aspects of our lives, whether we like it or not. As is a theme for me, I would prefer that we proactively think about how strong technologies, including artificial intelligence, will affect the arts and humanities, not just science and engineering. Games, as a product designed to elicit pleasure, are no exception. Games touched my life as a child and inspired me to understand how they worked, ultimately leading to my career as a software developer. It seems only right that I should contribute back.